HIAASEN: Huckabee Sanders’ book on Trump will be stranger than fiction

Monday

Aug 7, 2017 at 4:52 PM

Carl Hiaasen | Syndicated Columnist

Some day, when all this lunacy is over, Sarah Huckabee Sanders will sit across the desk from Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert and tell America what it was like to be the White House press secretary during the administration of Donald J. Trump.

She’ll be promoting a book, of course, and will appear charming, witty, and profoundly relieved not to be speaking on behalf of a president who can’t stop lying.

Sanders’ book will be filled with so many wacky anecdotes that talk-show hosts won’t know where to begin the interview. They might start by asking her about Trump’s phantom phone conversations.

Last week, for instance, the president bragged that he’d received two glowing, congratulatory calls.

One supposedly came from the head of the Boy Scouts of America, praising Trump for the speech he delivered to kids at the national Boy Scout Jamboree.

Trump had been criticized for the coarse partisan tone of his remarks, prompting the Boy Scouts leadership to issue a statement apologizing to those who were “offended by the political rhetoric that was inserted into the jamboree.”

But a transcript from a Wall Street Journal interview reveals the president proclaiming, “I got a call from the head of the Boys Scouts saying it was the greatest speech that was ever made to them …”

Only problem: The Boy Scouts of America said it never happened.

This embarrassing revelation came only a day after Trump invented another phantom chat conceived to highlight his fabulous greatness.

“Even the president of Mexico called me,” he boasted at a Cabinet meeting during a discussion of illegal immigration. “They said their southern border — very few people are coming because they know they’re not going to get through our border, which is the ultimate compliment.”

There was, of course, no phone call from Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.

No, she admitted, the head of the Boy Scouts never phoned to praise the president’s speech, as he claimed. And that fawning phone call Trump said he got from Peña Nieto? It did not occur, Sanders conceded.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a lie — that’s a bold accusation,” she bristled at the same media briefing.

And how is a made-up story not a lie?

Unfortunately, she’s now got another Mexico problem — leaked transcripts of a real phone call between her boss and Peña Nieto a week after Trump took office.

In their conversation, Trump said the border wall debate had both of them in “a political bind,” and repeatedly warned Peña Nieto to stop saying his country wouldn’t pay for the project.

He told the Mexican leader that the wall was financially “the least important thing we are talking about, but politically this might be the most important.”

Peña Nieto reiterated his position that Mexico wouldn’t pay for the wall.

“But you cannot say that to the press … I cannot live with that,” Trump complained.

Peña Nieto said the issue “related to the national pride of my country,” but agreed to stop talking about it publicly. Since then, Trump has asked Congress to budget money for the wall.

Voters who actually believed he’d get Mexico to pay might be surprised to hear it’s the “least important” issue between the two countries. Clearly the president’s real phone calls are more politically problematic than his imaginary ones.

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